This is the kind of movie for
which beer and pizza were made. Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter
boasts an exploitation premise of such purity -- and follows
through on it with such a sharp sense of fun -- that it's a ready-made
cult movie (and is, incidentally, a lot more entertaining than
Buffy the Vampire Slayer has been this season). Lee Gordon
Demarbre's film is not trash, but it genuflects to trash -- great
trash, I should clarify; the breed of chintzy throwaway pulp
many of us have spent too many hours watching on video. It will
offend those who are offended by the very title; it will probably
thrill those who take one look at the title and immediately want
to see the film.

Vampires are daywalkers now,
it seems; for reasons I'll allow Ian Driscoll's script to reveal
for itself, the vamps are singling out lesbians for bloodsucking.
(Why not beefy heterosexual men? Well, then you wouldn't get
the Sapphic blood-draining scenes, not to mention a couple of
agreeably gratuitous lesbian kissing scenes.) Led by the powerful
Johnny Golgotha (Driscoll himself) and Maxine Schreck (Murielle
Varhelyi), the vampires are rapidly depleting the lesbian population
of Ottawa. Enter Jesus Christ (Phil Caracas), the only man who
can thwart the hordes of the undead -- with the love of Christ,
of course, but also with the fists and feet of Christ.

With the help of red-latex-clad
Mary Magnum (Maria Moulton) and legendary Mexican wrestler El
Santo (Jeff Moffat), Jesus readies his stakes and girds himself
for battle. And there's a lot of battle. Every ten minutes or
so (sometimes even less), we can expect an elaborate kung-fu
showdown: Jesus against voracious female vamps, Jesus against
a seemingly never-ending parade of atheists, Jesus against a
bunch of vampires hanging out in a bar. I was slightly disappointed
that Jesus doesn't retain the classic Jesus look throughout;
early on, he gets a makeover -- a haircut, shave, ear piercings,
sleek new clothes -- partly to blend in better, but also, I think,
because a guy with long hair getting in his face and flowing
garments impeding his movements isn't going to last long in hand-to-hand.

There are even a couple of
musical numbers, which are in the same what-the-hell spirit as
everything else in the movie. JCVH is essentially good-hearted
-- Demarbre is laughing with his film, not laughing at
it in the manner of a cold-blooded hipster inviting you to ridicule
junk. A hairy-chested transvestite is brought in for some comedy,
but s/he is also the only one who picks a bleeding Jesus up off
the street and nurses him back to health. At one point, Johnny
Golgotha sneers that lesbians are "deviants"; Jesus
counters, in their defense, that any love is good. Phil Caracas
plays Jesus seriously, but also as a regular guy with frailties
(Jesus gets his ass kicked more often than you'd think). The
movie's portrait of Jesus is, in its own retro-exploitation way,
reverent. He even heals the mortal wound of a violently
deranged human he's just dispatched.

The movie carries no MPAA rating,
but I'd judge it a hard PG-13. The gore is obviously fake, the
guts are of the farcical mad-lab school, there's no nudity (some
will be saddened), and the only real profanity appears as a gag
on a T-shirt. The typical line on JCVH is that it's a
cheerful throwback to a particular type of '70s drive-in fare;
between the out-of-sync dubbing and the scratchy 8mm look, the
homage is perfect. Demarbre was right to avoid shooting this
on digital video, where it would've looked too much like a lot
of direct-to-video crap. It feels wrong, somehow, for this to
be on a nice DVD with extras; it needs to be on a grainy videotape
with the Vestron Video company animation in front of it. I'd
like to persist in the fantasy that this is really a recently
unearthed 1977 movie.

Still, we're seeing a growing
number of filmmakers paying tribute to the cinematic Big Macs
they wolfed down as kids. There's Tarantino, of course, whose
every film seems designed to stand alongside the bad-ass '70s
stuff he loves, and Kevin Smith's Jay and Silent Bob may as well
have been Cheech and Chong for a new generation. Jesus Christ
Vampire Hunter falls into the same lovably (and lovingly)
disreputable category. It has nothing in particular on its agenda
except to have fun and share it. That it hails from Canada, which
we Americans have been conditioned to view as the home of pensive
art-house directors like Cronenberg and Egoyan, just adds to
the fun. Would Cronenberg ever make a movie about a vampire-ass-whupping
messiah? No, but Lee Gordon Demarbre would.